The proposed ethnographic research will continue and expand the work began in phase one of the Hispanic Study Project, on the Lower East Side. The objective is to describe patterns of drug consumption and commerce in the socio-economic context of a deteriorated, multi-ethnic neighborhood. The research will utilize the community study method with: (1) participant observation basic to such additional ethnographic techniques as, (2) collection of career trajectories and life histories of drug dealers, users, no-users and addicts, and (3) tracing of kinship and friendship networks of local leaders and other key persons, (4) examination of the impact of political and institutional policies of the society on the neighborhood, (5) gathering of discourses for sociolinguistic analysis. An ecological census of the research area, designed, and completed in the first phase of the research forms the basis for the proposed research. Trust and cooperation of the residents, essential in this type of research have also been established in the first fifteen months of fieldwork in the research locale.